Hello everybody watching Nintendo Direct. I'm Eiji Aonuma, the producer of The Legend of Zelda. I felt like it hadn't been very long since we celebrated the 25th Anniversary of "The Legend of Zelda" with you. But it has already been one year since then. Time sure flies, doesn't it? Wii U launched at the end of last year, so I'd like to be able to talk soon about the new Zelda game we are preparing for you on Wii U, but since I have to wait until you can see actual game visuals to talk about it in detail, I will instead talk about the driving theme behind our development.

Our mission in developing this new Zelda game for Wii U is quite plainly to rethink the conventions of Zelda. I'm referring to things such as the player is supposed to complete dungeons in a certain order. That you are supposed to play by yourself, the things that we've come to take for granted recently. We want to set aside these "conventions," get back to basics to create a newborn Zelda so players today can enjoy the real essence of the franchise.

We had actually worked on this kind of challenge with Skyward Sword, but we weren't able [to] put efforts in changing the linear structure of the game. I hope to be able to talk to you in more detail about how it will change after I see it come together a bit more. Separately from that, there are some interesting images that have emerged from the development process for this new Wii U game that I'd like to show you.

If you're a Zelda series fan, you may know what this image is. This is an image showing Windfall Island from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which was released 10 years ago on Nintendo GameCube. And it is now in HD on Wii U. After the Zelda team showed the Wii U Zelda demo that we called the Zelda HD Experience at E3 2011, we continued to experiement with converting past Zelda art styles into HD as we continued to consider graphical styles for the new game, but in fact felt as if it had been transformed into something entirely new.

The reason I wanted to show you these pictures today is because our new Zelda title looks like it is going to take some time to complete, so I wanted to report that while you're waiting for that game to release, we intend to offer you The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, reborn on Wii U, to play in the meantime. I hope you will look forward to both The Wind Waker and our all new Zelda title.

Member

Nintendo Directs aren't purely release dates, thankfully.
I bet there will be at least one title that we either didn't see before (hopefully along the lines of F-Zero) or that we know about but want more of (hopefully Bayonetta 2).

Also I'm pretty sure that we will see a handful of new eShop titles for both Wii U and 3DS.

Banned

It's a shame they're having them all at the same time, it would have been rad to watch the Japanese one tonight by having it air in the morning there, but I guess they know the problem with that direction is they're internet presentations. Everyone would just as easily watch the first one and then have no reason to watch the regional presentation for anything but verifying what gets an already confirmed localization or something. Maybe they should instead set these up in different times but with exclusive game footage each, making them all worth watching. I'm sure the Japanese aren't happy about waiting until night. Anyway, I'll be watching both at the same time muting whichever is less interesting at the time since there may be Japanese exclusive content shown as usual before they confirm localizations for some of them. If my dodgy internet connection holds.